Yahoos, Get in the Office!

The latest move by the new chief executive of Yahoo Marissa Mayer, who herself returned to work weeks after giving birth seems to signify exactly what is wrong with Yahoo: The company is lead by the executives who are stuck in the mentality of the 1990's with the filing cabinets and water cooler talks.

According to Marissa Mayers: "Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home."

Virgin entrepreneur Richard Branson, who spends much of his time working on Necker Island in the Caribbean, was quick to respond, calling it a "backwards step in an age when remote working is easier and more effective than ever".

Prof Jennifer Glass, co-author of a report on the US workforce published by the University of Texas at Austin, says for many people, especially those in their 30s and 40s, teleworking is part of their work after they have already done 40 hours in the office.
Glass was "flabbergasted" by the Yahoo memo. "This seems to be trying to bring Yahoo in line with corporate America, not high-tech industries," she says.
"The idea that this is going to promote more innovation seems bizarre."

The steps below will work for your iPhone if it is connected to AT&T or most other major U.S. carriers.

The 10 best movie manhunts compiled by The Guardian

The Great Train Robbery
Edwin S Porter, 1903

Set in the wild west, filmed across the Hudson river from New York, this landmark in narrative cinema begins in a railroad station with robbers overpowering the wireless operator, followed by the violent and bloody hijacking of a train. The assaulted radio operator is discovered and revived and a posse sworn in to track down the outlaws. This archetypal story of offence, pursuit and retribution has obsessed the cinema for 110 years and lies behind the famous admonition, attributed to movie pioneer Hal Roach (1892-1992): “Cut to the chase.” Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

M
Fritz Lang, 1931

The Most Dangerous Game
Ernest B Schoedsack, Irving Pichel, 1932

Les Misérables
Richard Boleslawski, 1935

The Stranger
Orson Welles, 1946

Odd Man Out
Carol Reed, 1947

North by Northwest
Alfred Hitchcock, 1959

Spartacus
Stanley Kubrick, 1960

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
Sam Peckinpah, 1973

The Fugitive
Andrew Davis, 1993

British quad designed by Lee Basford for Fluid, based on a photograph by El Bulli’s star photographer Francesc Guillamet, that conveyed the invention and joie de vivre (or joie of cooking) of Ferran Adrià’s creations.

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Digital sales are replacing the high street physical sales at a steady rate

Films and music had a smaller share of the digital market but sharper growth - downloaded films up by 20% and , music by 15%.

BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones said: "The entertainment industry has been struggling to adapt to the digital age.

"And while consumers are now paying for downloads, that's not making up for the rapid fall in high street sales."

Scientists in Peru have discovered what they think may be a new species of a spider that builds elaborate, fake spiders and hangs them in its web

Believed to be a new species in the genus Cyclosa, the arachnid crafts the larger spider from leaves, debris and dead insects. Though Cyclosa includes other sculpting arachnids, this is the first one observed to build a replica with multiple, spidery legs.

Scientists suspect the fake spiders serve as decoys, part of a defense mechanism meant to confuse or distract predators.

Want to deliver digital video media to all known devices? Think about encoding it at least 120 times. With more devices on its' way and rapidly changing standards, that number is likely to be much higher.

Xboxes, iPads, connected TVs: Netflix streams to a lot of different devices. More than 900, to be precise. And many of them have different screen sizes, bitrate requirements and codec support. That’s why Netflix is doing a whole lot of encoding

Cambodian Trees is a digital projection work by French artist Clement Briend who traveled to Cambodia to photograph these sculptural representations of deities and spirits from Cambodian culture overlaid on trees in several urban areas. Visit website

Motion pictures should probably be granted a short headstart in the release process. But it should coincide with the theatrical lifetime of a production of about three to four weeks. Even better, it should be adjusted to the box office life – if a movie performs so well that people keep flocking to cinemas, DVDs should wait. On the contrary, if the movie bombs, it should be given a chance to resurrect online, quickly, sustained by a cheaper but better targeted marketing campaign mostly powered by social networks.

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Good overview of four different strategies at Harvard Business Review (September 13, 2012) Shaping strategy:

Some environments, as internet software vendors well know, can’t be taken as given. For instance, in new or young high-growth industries where barriers to entry are low, innovation rates are high, demand is very hard to predict, and the relative positions of competitors are in flux, a company can often radically shift the course of industry development through some innovative move. A mature industry that’s similarly fragmented and not dominated by a few powerful incumbents, or is stagnant and ripe for disruption, is also likely to be similarly malleable.

Apple updated scripts to include movies on user's web pages. Old scripts apparently are now archived and are no longer updated by Apple. New scripts generated in the Save for Web (QuickTime Player 10.0) apparently work as intended only on Safari browser. Browsers (Mac) Firefox 3.6, Opera 12 and Chrome 20 all failed to display the video. IE9 (PC) failed to display video with the QuickTime Movie Controller as intended. Format tested is QuickTime Movie Controller.

Nice graph illustrates a viral highway of breaking news at MIT Technology Review.

Click below to see another graph representing the viral spread of a single tweet posted during last summer’s riots in Britain.

"UltraViolet is another feeble, doomed attempt by some dinosaur brain Hollywood execs to restrict the use of your legally bought digital purchase," wrote reviewer John Dettingmeijer. "UltraViolet is NOT a digital copy that resides on a device of your choice to be used on a device of your choice. It is a streaming service, for which you have to sign up and maintain an account, at the expense of your bandwidth, compatible with some but not all mobile devices."

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"Hi Scott, this is Steve," Steckley recalled hearing from the other end of the phone.

"Steve Jobs?" he asked.

"Yeah," Jobs said. "I just wanted to apologize for your incredibly long wait. It's really nobody's fault. It's just one of those things."

"Yeah, I understand."

Then Jobs explained that he expedited the repair. "I also wanted to thank you for your support of Apple," Jobs said. "I see how much equipment you own. It really makes my day to see someone who enjoys our products so much and who supports us in the good times and bad."

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Money - A chart of almost all of it, where it is, and what it can do. It's broken out into "dollars, thousands, millions, billions, trillions".

In "six pillars of Steve Job's design legacy" Isaacson writes:

Markkula wrote his principles in a one-page paper titled "The Apple Marketing Philosophy" that stressed three points. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: "We will truly understand their needs better than any other company." The second was focus: "In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities." The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. "People DO judge a book by its cover," he wrote. "We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software, etc; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; it we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities."

In a review of Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, Malcolm Gladwell says that Steve Jobs was much more of a "tweaker" than an inventor.

Jobs's sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him-the tablet with stylus-and ruthlessly refining it. After looking at the first commercials for the iPad, he tracked down the copywriter, James Vincent, and told him, "Your commercials suck."

"Well, what do you want?" Vincent shot back. "You've not been able to tell me what you want."

"I don't know," Jobs said. "You have to bring me something new. Nothing you've shown me is even close."

Vincent argued back and suddenly Jobs went ballistic. "He just started screaming at me," Vincent recalled. Vincent could be volatile himself, and the volleys escalated.

When Vincent shouted, "You've got to tell me what you want," Jobs shot back, "You've got to show me some stuff, and I'll know it when I see it."

Stasi spy wearing a giant bear costume appears at a sports festival in Berlin.

Paul Krugman, a Nobel prizewinner in economics, criticised Bitcoin in an article in the New York Times in September:

"What we want from a monetary system isn't to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich. And that's not at all what is happening in Bitcoin. Bear in mind that dollar prices have been relatively stable over the past few years – yes, some deflation in 2008-2009, then some inflation as commodity prices rebounded – but overall consumer prices are only slightly higher than they were three years ago. What that means is that if you measure prices in Bitcoins, they have plunged; the Bitcoin economy has in effect experienced massive deflation."

Writing in the September/October edition of Technology Review, the New Yorker financial writer James Surowiecki noted that Bitcoin might indeed be trapped in a deflationary spiral:

"With ordinary currencies, though, there's a limit to how far down the spiral can go, since people still need to eat, pay their bills, and so on, and to do so they need to use their currency. But these things aren't true of bitcoins: you can get along perfectly well without ever spending them, so there's no imperative for people to stop hoarding and start spending. It's easy to imagine a scenario in which the vast majority of bitcoins are held by people hoping to sell them to other people."

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A very passionate post by former Amazon employee and current Google employee Steve Yegge in which he reflects how Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right:

Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.

And more on Chrome:

And so we wind up with a browser that doesn't let you set the default font size. Talk about an affront to Accessibility. I mean, as I get older I'm actually going blind. For real. I've been nearsighted all my life, and once you hit 40 years old you stop being able to see things up close. So font selection becomes this life-or-death thing: it can lock you out of the product completely. But the Chrome team is flat-out arrogant here: they want to build a zero-configuration product, and they're quite brazen about it, and Fuck You if you're blind or deaf or whatever. Hit Ctrl-+ on every single page visit for the rest of your life.